I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. We're about to learn about the universe. It's vastness. It's dynamism. And how we know all these things about it.

Speaking at TED Women 2021, writer Maria Popova tells us a surprising story of a well-known telescope and the people

who made better understanding of the universe possible. In 1908, Henrietta Swan Levitt, one of the

women known as the Harvard computers who changed our understanding of the universe

long before they could vote was cataloging photographic plates at the Harvard College

Observatory single-handedly analyzing 2,000 variable stars, stars with fluctuating brightness,

kind of like a lighthouse beacon.

When she began noticing a distinct correlation between their brightness and their blinking

pattern, that correlation made it possible to measure the distance of stars for the very

first time furnishing the yardstick of the universe.

Meanwhile, a dutiful teenage boy in the Midwest was repressing his childhood

love of astronomy and beginning his legal studies to fulfill his dying father's demand for an

ordinary, reputable life. When his father died, Edwin Hubble turned that passion for the stars into formal study and discovered

two revolutionary facts about the universe, that it is tremendously bigger than we thought,

and that it's getting bigger and bigger by the blink. One October evening in 1923 perched at the foot of the largest telescope in the world at Mount Wilson Observatory.

Hubble took a 45-minute exposure of Andromeda, which was then thought to be one of many spiral nebulae in our Milky Way.

The notion of a galaxy, a gravitationally bound cluster of stars and dust, the dark matter

didn't exist at the time. The Milky Way, which by the way was coined as a term by Chaucer in the 14th century,

was thought to be what was called an island universe beyond the edge edge of which lay cold, dark nothingness.

But when Hubble looked at the photograph the next morning and compared it to previous ones,

he furrowed his brow and with a gasp of revelation scribbled right on top of the plate,

V-A-R, and then drew an exclamation point,

...